Rusty’s Retirement is a relaxing cautionary tale that sits at the bottom of your screen

I’ve now clocked over 200 hours in recent Steam Sensation Rusty’s Retirement. I should have written up my thoughts long ago, but, as it turns out, I wasn’t at my computer for most of those hours; in fact, I’m playing it right now.

Rusty’s Retirement is the latest idle-farming game to arrive on Steam, but not only is it a great example of the genre, it has something else going for it. Something nostalgic, or at least something that’s not been prevalent for so long that it seems fun and novel again.

That’s right, it’s ‘full screen’ but not full screen, as in, it just hovers as an application, taking up about 25% of your screen and filing itself away behind other objects when it’s not the active window. It’ll be familiar to people who messed around with the PetZ games, but also things like Sheep.exe and other desktop pals; Or if you followed our advice back in 2019 and downloaded Cyberpet Graveyard.

Beyond its novel container it’s still a really good idle farming game. I’ve not played Haiku’s Adventure, the previous game from developer Mister Morris Games that lends its characters (and presumably setting) to Rusty’s Retirement, but it’s clear from the easter egg and, well, features of the game that Rusty is actually resettling Earth long after a robotic uprising has wiped out humans. Cars, wire spools and giant cogs litter most of each of the areas you can gradually reclaim, while you claim fossils to create cattle and swine.

Most of your time is spent placing seeds, which (bar wheat) cost spare parts. Each of these has different stats, be that time to harvest, how many times it needs watering before it can be harvested and how many times it can be harvested before you’ll need to replant. Each one also has a biofuel value, and that’s important because Rusty themself is very slow, and this is actually an idle game all about automation and exponential growth.

You can, from the get-go, build more farm plots, wells, storage units and three types of robots that help with farming. Each of these (Watering Bot, Harvesting Bot and Biofuel Bot) require Biofuel to work, and so you’ll need to spin up three different crops on a biofuel generator to… well, generate some biofuel.

It then starts growing exponentially. Once you’ve harvested a certain quantity of seeds (each of which you get spare parts for when you harvest) you’ll unlock more. Later crops require more parts to plant but pay out more (and give more biofuel) in kind. Soon enough you can build houses for other robots. These add the opportunity to herd cattle, grow berries (which follow a similar set up to crop unlocking but using bulbs and butterflies) and upgrade your robots.

You can also welcome Sonnet, who allows you to place decorations around your farm, including crop signposts which not only look appealing but indicate to the final bot, Splunk, what they should be sowing if they find themselves at the plot. Splunk is the final step in automation, at which point your farm will be planting, watering, harvesting and refining its own crops, all while Rusty potters around occasionally helping out.

Rusty’s Retirement is a fantastic distraction from whatever you should be doing, and also probably a pretty decent warning about the dangers of overenthusiastic productivity optimisation.

Rusty’s Retirement is available now for Windows and Mac.